21 April – Chattanooga

Today was Steve’s 50^th birthday 😊

We started the day with a guided tour of Raccoon Mountain Caverns. The tour took around an hour, and although not boasting spectacular formations, it is a living cave, meaning that it is still growing. Some areas are growing quite fast, there was a set of stairs constructed in the 1950s that are now almost half covered in flowstone. 

The cave has suffered enormous damage over the years. Tourists were encouraged to break off the formations as souvenirs (they paid for them), and during the Tennessee cave wars rival cave tour operators would go on each other’s tours and deliberately break formations to sabotage the caves. Quite a bit of damage was also done by the cave’s original owner, who was in the business of commercialising caves. He also owned the nearby Ruby Falls cave, which was badly damaged by the blasting he did to create accessible access to the cave. His solution was to chip off formations from Raccoon Mountain Caverns and reinstall them at Ruby Falls. As the cavern is a living cave, it will continue to create formations, but over millions of years.

We saw some of the native inhabitants of the cave – baby salamanders and cave crickets. There was a big wolf spider on the ceiling at the entrance, but he doesn’t count because he is a camper, not a native.

After the cave tour we had a bit of R&R in the sun. It was a beautiful clear sunny day and a lovely temperature. 

In the afternoon we fired up the scooter and headed to Lookout Winery. The winery is on the side of the mountain overlooking the river, and the server pointed out that you can see three states – Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia from the balcony.

The wine was all Italian style and unfiltered. There were 18 varieties on tasting, from whites, roses, reds and blends. We particularly enjoyed one of the blends and bought a bottle to have with dinner on their deck. Dinner was salmon salad and authentic Italian pizza. The pizza dough was made from flour imported from Tuscany, the tomato sauce and cheese were also imported from Italy. Interestingly the restaurant is in a dry town (no alcohol) so they get around it by selling you the bottle unopened and giving you glasses. What you do then is up to you and can’t fall back on the restaurant. The tastings are classed as samples and are not subject to liquor laws. Very strange!